A conventional technique for selecting an antenna in a receiver is based on the signal strength of a preamble of a data packet being introduced to the receiver through the antenna. In such a scheme, the signal strength of every antenna in the receiver is measured, where the receiver is often equipped with multiple antennas to enhance receive reliability of the packet. This typically involves considerable amount of time and/or power dissipation. In addition, due to hardware constraints in some orthogonal frequency divisional multiplexing (OFDM) architectures, the sequential switching through the multiple antennas to determine the reliability of the data packet may not be possible. Furthermore, the signal strength alone may not be sufficient to properly reflect the true reception quality of the packet in a wireless fading channel.
An alternative antenna selection criterion resorts to a long-term packet error rate (PER) evaluation by detecting an error in the packet (e.g., using a cyclic redundancy check (CRC)) introduced through each one of the multiple antennas in the receiver. Then, a long-term averaging of the error associated with each antenna may be compared against each other. However, this scheme may be too slow to react to more rapidly occurring changes in the receiver.